Hardware Security

Hardware Security

Hardware Security

University of Maryland, College Park

About this course: In this course, we will study security and trust from the hardware perspective. Upon completing the course, students will understand the vulnerabilities in current digital system design flow and the physical attacks to these systems. They will learn that security starts from hardware design and be familiar with the tools and skills to build secure and trusted hardware.

To learn hardware security, we first need to learn how hardware is designed. This week's lectures give an overview of the basics on digital logic design, which is a semester-long course for freshmen and sophomores in most schools. By no means we can cover all the materials. What we provide here is the minimal set that you need to understand about digital design for you to move on to learn hardware security.

7 videos, 2 readings

Reading: Syllabus

Reading: Week 1 Overview

Video: Introduction

Video: Digital System Specification

Video: Digital System Implementation

Video: Function Simplification and Don't Care Conditions

Video: Sequential System Specification

Video: Sequential System Implementation

Video: Vulnerabilities in Digital Logic Design

Graded: Quiz

WEEK 2

Design Intellectual Property Protection

As a hardware designer or a company, you want to protect your design intellectual property (IP) from being misused (by users, competitors, silicon foundry, etc). We will cover how you can build such protection during the design process which can be used as an evidence to support law enforcement protection. You are expected to understand the basic digital logic design knowledge covered in week 1. We will use several NP-hard problems as examples to illustrate the concepts of IP protection. These problems (graph vertex coloring problem and graph partitioning problem) will be introduced in the lecture and you do not need to know the concept of NP-complete.

6 videos, 1 reading

Reading: Week 2 Overview

Video: Introduction to IP Protection

Video: Watermarking Basics

Video: Watermarking Examples

Video: Good Watermarks

Video: Fingerprinting

Video: Hardware Metering

Graded: Quiz

WEEK 3

Physical Attacks and Modular Exponentiation

This week you will learn the fundamentals about physical attacks: what are physical attacks, who are the attackers, what are their motivations, how can they attack your system (from hardware), what kind of skills/tools/equipment they should need to break your system, etc. You will also see what are the available countermeasures. You will learn how system security level and tamper resistance level are defined and some general guidelines on how to make your system secure by design.
In the second part, you will learn a useful mathematical operation called modular exponentiation. It is widely used in modern cryptography but it is very computational expensive. You will see how security vulnerability might be introduced during the implementation of this operation and thus make the mathematically sound cryptographic primitives breakable. This will also be important for you to learn side channel attack next week.

7 videos, 1 reading

Reading: Week 3 Overview

Video: Physical Attacks (PA) Basics

Video: Physical Attacks and Countermeasures

Video: Building Secure Systems

Video: Modular Exponentiation (ME) Basics

Video: ME in Cryptography

Video: ME Implementation and Vulnerability

Video: Montgomery Reduction

Graded: Quiz

WEEK 4

Side Channel Attacks and Countermeasures

This week, we focus on side channel attacks (SCA). We will study in-depth the following SCAs: cache attacks, power analysis, timing attacks, scan chain attacks. We will also learn the available countermeasures from software, hardware, and algorithm design.

5 videos, 1 reading

Reading: Week 4 Overview

Video: Introduction to Side Channel Attacks

Video: Memory Vulnerabilities and Cache Attacks

Video: Power Analysis

Video: More Attacks and Countermeasures

Video: Modified Modular Exponentiation

Graded: Quiz

WEEK 5

Hardware Trojan Detection and Trusted IC Design

This week we study hardware Trojan and trusted integrated circuit (IC) design. Hardware Trojans are additions or modifications of the circuit with malicious purposes. It has become one of the most dangerous and challenging threats for trusted ID design. We will give hardware Trojan taxonomies based on different criteria, explain how hardware Trojan work, and then talk about some of the existing approaches to detect them. We define trusted IC as circuit that does exactly what it is asked for, no less and no malicious more. We will illustrate this concept through the design space analysis and we will discuss several practical hardware Trojan prevention methods that can facilitate trust IC design.

5 videos, 1 reading

Reading: Week 5 Overview

Video: Hardware Trojan (HT) and Trusted IC

Video: Hardware Trojan Taxonomy

Video: Hardware Trojan Detection Overview

Video: Hardware Trojan Detection Methods

Video: Trusted IC Design with HT Prevention

Graded: Quiz

WEEK 6

Good Practice and Emerging Technologies

This is the last week and we will cover some positive things on hardware security. We start with trust platform module (TPM), followed by physical unclonable functin (PUF), and FPGA-based system design. We conclude with a short discussion on the roles that hardware play in security and trust.

6 videos, 1 reading

Reading: Week 6 Overview

Video: FPGA Implementation of Crypto

Video: Vulnerabilities and Countermeasures in FPGA Systems

Video: Role of Hardware in Security and Trust

Video: Physical Unclonable Functions (PUF) Basics

Video: RO PUF: Reliability

Video: Trust Platform Module and Other Good Practices

Graded: Quiz

WEEK 7

Final Exam

Graded: Final Exam

FAQs

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University of Maryland, College Park

The University of Maryland is the state's flagship university and one of the nation's preeminent public research universities. A global leader in research, entrepreneurship and innovation, the university is home to more than 37,000 students, 9,000 faculty and staff, and 250 academic programs. Its faculty includes three Nobel laureates, three Pulitzer Prize winners, 47 members of the national academies and scores of Fulbright scholars. The institution has a $1.8 billion operating budget, secures $500 million annually in external research funding and recently completed a $1 billion fundraising campaign.

The presentation style is dry but straightforward. Material is excellent, and the lecturer can speak authoritatively about it. In Weeks 4 and 5, Montgomery reductions are presented without much mathematical background, which means you'll need to go figure out Euclidean division, Bezout's identity, etc. on your own. Not recommended for people without a background in CS, electrical engineering, or math.

AJ

Nice, instructive course.

However, from time to time I felt I would need to have access to the copies of the slides, not currently available.

Awesome and hardcore material... Will need to dig a couple more times the concepts. Thank you very much.